1944- [fam. Jack]; ed. QUB; grad. with a general degree in zoology, histOry, social anthropology, philosophy and English; afterwards completed a doctorate on Separation and Return in the Fiction of Brian Moore, Michael McLaverty and Benedict Kiely (University of Oregon 1970), 1970; Ass. Prof. of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver (later full professor); critical works include Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (1974); Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival (1987); Foster urged the acceptance of Hiberno-English as a literary language and later the attempt to establish dialectic status for Scotch-Irish (Ullans) as distinct from Hiberno-English;

issued and Colonial Consequences (Dublin: Lilliput 1991), a broad-ranging study of Anglo-Irish literature since the seventeenth century combining various essays published elsewhere and including an up-dated view of Seamus Heaney; debated Northern Ireland with Gerry Adams at Board of Trade forum in Vancouver, 1994, and ed. The Idea of the Union: Statements and Critiques in Support of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1995), publ. by the Belcouver Press - formed for the purpose; issued The Titanic Complex: A Cultural Manifest (1997);

ed., with C. G. Chesney, Nature in Ireland (1997); issued Recoveries (2002), a study of neglected strands in Irish cultural history incl. signally Darwinism and its opponents; ed. Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel (2006); issued Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (2008), correcting the critical squint began with the Revival that resulted in the occlusion of much Irish writing; retired from Columbia, Vancouver and appt. to research chair at QUB, 2009; settled in Portaferry with his wife Gale Malmo; issued Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture (2009), a sequel of sorts to Colonial Consequences; his dramatic monologue A Better Boy (2014) was performed by Ian MacElhinney at RBS London. FDA

Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture (Dublin: IAP 2009), 257pp. CONTENTS. Preface [vii]; Note on the Text [x]; Foreword [xi]; I. Writers: 1. Emblems of Diversity: Yeats and the Great War [3]; 2. The Islandman: The Teller and the Tale [17]; 3. Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde [30]; 4. The Weir: Inheriting the Wind [48]; 5. Stretching the Imagination: Some Trevor Novels [57]; 6. All the Long Traditions: Loyalty in Barry and Ishiguro [72]; 7. Virtual Irelands: Martin McDonagh [90]; 8. Revisitations: Criticism and Benedict Kiely [101]; 9. The Autocartography of Tim Robinson [118]. II. Writing and Culture: 10. Strangford Lough and its Writers [129]; 11. Blackbird [141]; 12. Guests of the Nation [151]; 13. Getting the North: Yeats and Northern Nationalism [174]; 14. Was there Ulster Literary Life before Heaney? [205]; 15. Bloomsdays Joyce [219]; 16. Between Two Shadows: Kettle, Lynd and the Great War [235]; Index [253]. Note: a number of the above essays are quoted on the RICORSO pages devoted to the authors cited in the titles and others mentioned in the chapters; see also full-text version of Revisitations: Criticism and Benedict Kiely, in RICORSO Library, Irish Critical Classics, via index, or direct]

CommentaryConor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992 (Four Courts Press 2000), assails J. W. Fosters call for psychological embourgeoisement of liberal humanism - which he calls at the least disappointing- in conjunction with remarks of Longley about the impossibility of leaping from primitivism to post-modernism without an intervening period of historical, cultural and evaluative ground-clearing. McCarthy writes: What Longley and Foster seem to miss is [Desmond] Bells sense of the contradictions of modernity. In the desire for psychological embourgeoisement and for a thorough-going empiricism, we can read signs of a seriously [sic] undialectical form of critique, that is incapable of paying attention to the underbelly of the process of modernisation. […M]odernisation, as it is implicit in psychological embourgeoisement or evaluative ground-clearing, is understood as an entirely beneficent process. What Longley and Foster fail to grasp are the full ramifications of the process of whidh they constitute the intellectual analogue. (p.36.) Further: […] a crucial function of this book is to draw attention to the gaps and elisions, the points of hesitation in cultural production in Ireland, and also in the kind of cultural critique exemplified by Foster and Longley. It is in such gaps or at such moments of hesitation that this book tries to locate itself, drawing attention to the tensions between tradition and modernity, between national culture and modernism, between authority and critique. (Ibid., p.37; see also quotation from Colonial Consequence, 1991, under Quotations, infra.)

Emer Nolan, Making a Meal of the Mainstream, review of Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture, in The Irish Times (210 March 2002), Weekend: […] Although the subtitle promises something rather comprehensive, most of the chapters in this collection circle around Fosters key preoccupations. Essays on Tomás OCrohan, Tim Robinson, Strangford Lough and on the image of the blackbird in Irish culture combine his long-standing concern with the natural world with his literary interests. Foster is especially concerned to rescue various groups of Irish people that he believes have been excluded by Irish academic criticism, guided by its nationalist biases. His list of the previously marginalised includes female and gay writers. Such writers do not feature here in any detail, with the exception of an essay on Oscar Wildes attitude to science. This particular recuperative project sits oddly with Fosters clear hostility to those ideologues in the American university literature classroom who promote Gender or Gay Studies. Irish scientists and naturalists must also be saved from the condescension of posterity. Foster laments Irish indifference or hostility to Irish combatants in the first World War and to Irish men who served in the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the Royal Irish Constabulary. He notes W. B. Yeatss failure to acknowledge the imperialist and unionist sympathies of his patron Augusta Gregorys son Robert, killed in Italy in 1918, in the celebrated elegy An Irish Airman Foresees his Death. In general, Foster deplores Yeatss lack of interest in the war as a theme for poetry; but he goes further in perceiving behind that aversion a broader Irish recoil from reality and obligation. In fact, for a critic who dislikes the supposedly homogenising tendencies of mainstream Irish criticism, Foster indulges in a fair degree of off-the-cuff stereotyping himself. For example, in the script of a pre-performance talk on a play by Conor McPherson, he announces that while aggressively buying rounds of drink is very Irish, real emotional honesty is not so Irish. Apparently, it is the unexpected appearance of the latter in an Irish pub that helps to make The Weir an Irish play of unusual psychological depth. (see also full-text version of Revisitations: Criticism and Benedict Kiely, in RICORSO Library, Criticism > Reviews, via index, or direct])

QuotationsKiely Connection: See Foster, Revisitations: Criticism and Benedict Kiely, in Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture (Dublin: IAP 2009): Benedict Kiely was my own guide around Carleton country in 1970, after I returned to Northern Ireland from Oregon with my PhD; I had written a dissertation on Kiely, Brian Moore and Michael McLaverty, having been converted by Kiely in Oregon from the study of aesthetics to the study of Irish literature. Carleton became the father figure in Ulster fiction in the book I was then beginning, Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (1974), a book encouraged by my critical mentor, Kiely. (p.116 [n.22].) Further: […] In 1991 I prefaced my collection of critical essays, Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture with what was then an unusual personal account of the originating circumstances of the essays, though I was perhaps unconsciously influenced by both Kiely and Heaney. This kind of personal intervention in Irish criticism is no longer uncommon. (My personal account included my memory of meeting Benedict Kiely in Oregon in 1965.) (Idem; n.24.).

Ulster Protestants: tragic in the classic senses of their having wasted their creative potential, misused their power, and failed to recognise their character flaw of overweening pride that has rendered the power brittle and their outlook myopic.; Having won a victory of sorts in the plantation, the Protestants have been paradoxically enslaved by that victory ever since, never secure, nerve-torn through the need for constant vigilance. (Forces and Themes, 1974, p.125.)

Ulster workers: To their enemies, the Ulster working and artisan class is merely bigoted, the Ulster managerial class merely philistine; for the Protestant North, with its incorrigible non-conformism, industrialism, and political unionism, was not to be part of the literary revival; the participation of this unqiue Irish city of Belfast in the great international cultural project of modernity. (All cited Gerald Dawe, review of Titanic, in The Irish Times, [5] June 1997.)

Ulster Catholics: What [the Ulster Catholic] wants is not progress, a forward looking reversal of decay through agricultural improvement, but rather a return, the recover of a politico-spiritual impossibility - a mythic landscape of beauty and plenitude that is pre-Partititon, pre-Civil War, pre-famine, pre-plantation, and pre-Tudor. (The Landscape of the Planter and the Gael in the Poetry of John Hewitt and John Montague, in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, Nov. 197, p.29; quoted in Edna Longley, Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland, The Crane Bag, Vo. 9, No. 1, 1985, p.29; also cited in Peter Van de Kamp, Desmond Egan … [&c.], in Geert Lernout, The Crows Behind the Plough, Rodopi, 1991, 148.)

Bourgeois man (Irish-style): […] the autonomous individual may be a bourgeois humanist fantasy, but many of us in Ireland would like to enjoy that fantasy, thank you very much […] it would be foolish to embrace the psychological socialism of poststructuralism before reaping the reward of psychological embourgeoisement. (Colonial Consequences, Dublin: Lilliput Press 1991, p.231; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000, p.212.) [Note: numerous citations from this text are given elsewhere under separate authors in RICORSO.)

Unionist suasion: [U]nionists could become persuaders in the process of Southerners acknowledging the repressed British components of their society (The Idea of the Union: Statements and Critiques in Support of the Union of Gt. Britain and Northern Ireland, Vancouver: Belcouver Press 1995, p.74; quoted in Sean Lysaght, review, Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1996, p.15.)

Irish dialects?: the local dialect of modernism; that dialect has been drowend out by the Romantic tones of Irish nationalism.

Irish short story: A explanation would include the persistence among Irish people of the gift of anecdote, of idiomatic flair, of the comic tradition and of the real life characters (an endangered species today) who offer themselves ready-made for portraiture in the economical short form. ( Irish Fiction 1965-1990 [editorial essay], The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, ed. Seamus Deane, Derry 1991, p. 939.)

Literary Revival: [an attempt] to emply literature in a resuscitation of elder Irish values and culture that they hoped would transform the reality of the Ireland they inhabited. (Irish Revival, p.xvi; cited in James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922, Conn: Greenwood Press 1997, p.6.)

Amor patris: In many ways I love all of Ireland and like James Joyces Leopold Bloom consider myself Irish because I was born and reared on the island. […] It is therefore an occasion for genuine regret, even pain, that I do not wish to be a citizen of an Ireland resembling the present Republc. When I lives there, I found it wanting in essentials of ethos, civil liberties, and the consensual patheon of heroes, in its story of itself. One of the most sacred spots in the South of Ireland is the Easter Rising room in the National Museum: I stand in it and feel utterly estranged, as I do if I stand in a Roman Catholic church: both are might formidable spaces, but they exlcude me and moreover wish to exclude me. (The Idea of the UnionBelcouver Press 1995, p.61.; quoted in Sean Lysaght, review, Irish Literary Supplement, Fall 1996, p.15.)

Bourgeois man: […] the autonomous individual may be a bourgeois humanist fantasy, but many of us in Ireland would like to enjoy that fantasy, thank you very much […] it would be foolish to embrace the psychological socialism of poststructuralism before reaping the reward of psychological embourgeoisement. ( Colonial Consequences, Lilliput Press 1991, p.231; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000, p.212.)

J. W. Foster, Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction (Oxford UP 2008) - Introduction ["The Shock of the Old"]: [...] The orthodox account explains Irish literature, including fiction, on the Revivals own ground and cultural nationalisms own ground. As a result, we have accommodated a counter-Revival (see, for example, three sections so titled in the third volume of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991) but have reserved no shelf-space for credible Irish writing that neither promoted nor repudiated the Revival and that reflected the continuities in both Irish ficiton and Irish society that survived Revivalism in literature and separatist nationalism in politics, even if these continuities were driven underground in the decades after the achievement of the Free State. To important fiction writers we associate with the counter-Revival were convinced of the unsuitability of Romantic Revival expression to the astringencies of Free State Ireland. They thought the new Ireland was a broken world, with its sectionalism, puritanism, philistinism, anti-intellectualism, and censorship and that it could not therefore sponsor an artistic realism over the stretch of the novel. […] (p.7.) [Cont.]

J. W. Foster (Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction, 2008), Introduction - cont: The exclusiveness is understandable for the Revival period, since the idea that it was only Ireland that mattered was a strategy by which a necessary native cultural recovery could happen. The problem is that the strategy became over time an exclusive policy and perspective, so that it is now no wonder the student of Irish literature should be drawn to novels set in Ireland even by English writers, more than to novels set in England even by Irish writers. The governing assumption is that a student of Irish literature is primarily a student, not of Irish writers, but of Irish culture, by which is meant a student of Irelands cultural nationality either in its most or least generous senses. But it isnt merely a question of focus and priorities. Critics have neglected numerous Irish novelists who felt qualified, and secure enough in their identity, to depict and illuminate the neighbouring island of Britain. Or to depict life beyond what until recently was called the British Isles. Irish popular fiction is a reminder that many Irish were engaged with matters in the wider world, that there was in Ireland, even during the time of the Irish Revival - a necessarily self-regarding and self-interested movement - a centrifugal energy and enthusiasm. Such energy and enthusiasm were facilitated and impelled by the Empire in which the Irish participated, certainly, but also by an historical Irish interest in the New World and other parts of the globe as well. The cultural as well as political sentiment of Sinn Fein (‘Ourselves) came to dominate Irish feeling as it was publicly acknowledged inside and outside Ireland, but the larger sentiment remained alive and expressive, though just as neglected by literary critics since, as well as during, the Revival. (p.10; for longer extracts, see RICORSO Library, Criticism, via index, or attached.]

References Dufour Catalogue (Spring 1997): A lengthy Introduction by the editor, John Wilson Foster, sets forth the grounds for examination and discovery as he asks the fundamental questions of the contributors: How has Irish nature been studied? How has it been expressed in literature and popular culture? How has it influenced and been influenced by political, economic, and social change?

NotesLiam ODowds new introduction to Albert Memmi, The Colonist and the Colonised [1957] (London: Earthscan 1990), contains the note: I would like to thank John Wilson Foster for his helpful and constructive comments from the other side of the Irish divided. Responsibility for misinterpretation and error is solely my own. (pp.64-65.)

A Better Boy (2014) is a dramatic monologue based on the sinking of the Titanic, and performed by Ian MacElhinney of Game of Thrones fame. It takes the form of an interview with William J. Pirie, the shipping magnate, who recalls the life of his nephew Thomas Andrews, the designer of the ship who went down with her. His monologue contests the defeatism associated with the disaster and celebrates the Machine Age, while re-igniting the pain of loss. It was produced the Brian Friel Theatre, Belfast (QUB) and the Brussels Art Centre (both Dec. 2104), and later at the Aspects of Irish Literature Festival, North Down Museum and the Royal Bank of Scotland offices in London (both Sept. 2014).